Add Another $5.5 Million to the Cost of Smith’s ‘Tylenot’ Folly

Pride, according to the Solomonic wisdom, goeth before destruction. Here in Wild Rose Country, though, it goeth before a big storage fee!

So far, for example, it has cost something like $5.5 million in storage charges for unusable medicine and questionable COVID masks destined for the landfill.

So it turns out that the first deadly sin can be quite expensive when it’s practised on a government scale. That’s what Alberta’s United Conservative Party government decided to do as the fallout continued from the embarrassing $70-million supply of Turkish “Tylenot” it unwisely ordered in 2022 to embarrass not-quite-former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a short-lived national shortage of children’s pain medication.

Alas for the UCP, sooner or later those millions of bottles of off-brand, overly viscous and nearly unusable children’s pain meds now nearing their expiration date — which Health Minister Adriana LaGrange gamely called “good quality drugs” at a news conference this week — are going to have to be dumped.

LaGrange was defending a hare-brained scheme by Premier Danielle Smith to dump the embarrassing bottles on Ukraine and pass them off as a contribution to that country’s war effort. Look for this brainstorm to quietly fizzle for lack of interest.

To make matters worse for the government, the Opposition NDP revealed that the UCP has spent more than $5 million storing pallet-loads of the Turkish “Tylenot” plus unused COVID masks supplied by MHCare Medical, an Alberta company named in allegations about dodgy contracts pushed by government insiders on unwilling Alberta Health Services executives.

“The UCP is wasting millions of taxpayer dollars keeping unused PPE and Turkish Tylenol in storage because they couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it after they bought it from their close friends and insiders,” said NDP house leader Christina Gray, who is officially leader of the Opposition until party leader Naheed Nenshi is able to run in the Edmonton-Strathcona riding, where he is expected to win with ease.

Smith, who gets to set the date for a byelection to replace former Edmonton-Strathcona MLA and premier Rachel Notley, is taking as long as she can to make it possible for Nenshi to win a seat in the house.

“The CorruptCare scandal” — as the NDP has dubbed the dodgy contracts affair that came to light when the government fired its hand-picked CEO of Alberta Health Services and she filed a $1.7-million wrongful dismissal suit full of bombshell allegations — “has cost Albertans even more than they realized,” Gray said.

Someone leaked photos, video and briefing materials to the NDP that show hundreds of pallets of supplies, including boxes of unused masks and medicine bottles sitting in an Edmonton warehouse. “Despite the UCP government signing a contract to pay $450,000 in 2023 to dispose of expired PPE, many pallets remain,” the Opposition said in a news release Tuesday.

“At a time when Albertans have so many other priorities like public health care and quality education, spending millions on storing useless goods is not one of them,” said Gray, who called again for a judicial inquiry into the whole sketchy-sounding affair.

The UCP has opted instead for a much more limited investigation led by a former Manitoba judge, Raymond E. Wyant, who will not have the power to compel testimony. While Wyant has a good reputation in legal circles, it is hard to see how he can conduct a meaningful investigation.

Meanwhile, the NDP said, 5,165 palettes of unusable PPE and “endless boxes of Turkish Tylenol they bought that were never used” sit in a private warehouse in Edmonton, still running up charges of $22.14 per pallet per month.

Obviously, the UCP strategic brain trust decided that was less embarrassing than just shipping the stuff off to the dump and admitting it in a short press release on the Friday before a holiday weekend.

Taxpayers federation supports premier’s visit to Florida hate-mongers

Meanwhile, plans are afoot for Smith to travel to Florida in a couple of weeks on our dime to appear onstage at a fundraiser for a fake university that pushes misinformation and hate with a far-right U.S. “influencer” known for his homophobic and occasionally anti-Canadian commentary.

Although Nenshi undoubtedly spoke the truth when he called the premier’s plans to share a stage with Ben Shapiro at the PragerU event on March 27 “despicable,” there’s nothing particularly surprising about Smith’s behaviour, which her office defends as a chance to speak up for Canada in the face of her hero Donald Trump’s attacks.

After all, when it comes to right-wing celebrities, Smith is a hopeless and pathetic fangirl. She demonstrated this last year when she raced off to Calgary the day after a shooting at Edmonton City Hall to sit beside Conrad Black and Jordan Peterson at the feet of Tucker Carlson. There, the three stooges of the Canadian right paid obeisance to the most famous far-right bloviator of them all.

And who knows? She may also be thinking of her future career prospects in the Benighted States if this Canadian political gig doesn’t last.

Regardless, it seems likely there is simply no way anyone could stop Smith from making a beeline for Florida, no matter how much her efforts there harm Canada and Alberta.

No, what’s shocking is that the so-called Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the self-described “tax watchdog” that purports to be non-partisan, leapt to Smith’s defence for using our tax dollars to help her raise money for hate-mongers in Florida.

“If she can get the Alberta oil and the Alberta message out in front of that crowd, that’s smart,” CTF Alberta director Kris Sims was quoted as saying by CTV News. Sims called the planned Florida junket “good value for money.”

If the CTF wants to continue to pass itself off as a legitimate organization, not just a mysteriously funded AstroTurf group with ties to the U.S. far right that acts as a farm team for conservative political parties like the UCP, it might want to suggest to its Alberta operative that she curb her enthusiasm.